A Man Paints With His Brains

This saying reflects a distinction Michelangelo maintained throughout his career between the intellectual conception of a work and its physical execution. Giorgio Vasari records a related remark in Lives of the Artists: Michelangelo held that the great artist's hands merely execute what the mind has already fully conceived. He applied this principle equally to sculpture, painting, and architecture — most visibly in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, where the theological program and compositional logic were worked out through hundreds of preparatory drawings before a brushstroke was applied. The idea anticipates his more specific formulation, recorded by Vasari, that "the compass must be in the eye."